Top 20 Recruiting Roundup: Women’s Class of 2018, First Edition

Stanford's only real issue over the past year has been breaststroke, and that looks well on its way to being more than fixed by fall of 2018. Stanford has recruited two of the best breaststrokers in the Class of 2018. Archive photo via Tim Binning/TheSwimPictures.com

Arkansas won 14 of 16 events in their decisive victory over Houston on Friday, January 18th. Peyton Palsha, Anna Hopkin, Vanessa Herrmann, and diver Brooke Schultz led the way for the Razorbacks, each picking up multiple individual wins.

AMES, Iowa – The Iowa State Cyclones (6-3, 1-0 Big 12) soundly defeated the Illinois State Redbirds (5-3, 1-1 MVC) 191-100 on Friday night. The Cyclones won 15-of-16 events in the win, the most events wins in a meet since 2016.

“Top 20 Recruiting Roundup” is a new series in which we compile all the verbal commitments for each of the top 20 teams in our NCAA Power Rankings. We’ll compile these lists periodically throughout the college swimming & recruiting season.

Stanford’s only real issue over the past year has been breaststroke, and that looks well on its way to being more than fixed by fall of 2018. Stanford has recruited two of the best breaststrokers in the Class of 2018.

That’s one big takeaway from our first look at the early hauls in the current recruiting season. Another is Georgia, which is a bit low on elite-tier talent this year, but has recruited three of our top twelve recruits, including national #1 Eva Merrell.

Bear in mind that the size of these recruiting classes depends heavily on the size of each team’s graduating class, which frees up both scholarship money and roster space. A big or small recruiting class is not necessarily a sign that a school is doing well or doing poorly in recruiting – but the individual athletes incoming do give a good feel of how well each program did at accumulating NCAA scoring-potential talent.

Here’s a look at the recruiting hauls for each program. For the sake of brevity, we are listing only the best two events for each swimmer, along with their home state (or country if outside the U.S.). Our list only includes high school graduating Class of 2018 swimmers (sorry early commits, you’ll have to wait for next year) or internationals who have committed during the current recruiting period.

Commits are listed in random order. Ranking numbers are from our previous recruit rankings from the summer and are not updated for more recent swims. All times are in short course yards unless otherwise noted. Times listed with “m” designate long course meters. Times listed are the athlete’s top two swims in USA Swimming Power Points or FINA points for long course. (Yes, this doesn’t always show an athlete’s full versatility. Yes, some athletes might have times not listed that “feel” more impressive than those listed. No, point-based ranking systems aren’t perfect. For the sake of consistency and brevity, this is the format we’ll be sticking to in order to realistically compile times from this many athletes).

Reminder: These are not ranks of recruiting classes. These ranks come from our most recent NCAA Power Rankings. The recruits listed are all the verbal commitments we are aware of at this time. If you have a verbal commitment to report, e-mail it to [email protected]

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Rachel

I get that nothing is perfect, but there has got to be a better way to pick the top two times. So many of these people hand great times missing. One thing it seems to do is put too much weight in backstroke. Everyone who has a decent backstroke time seems to have those picked, even if others are better. Maybe something to do with placing at NCAA’s?

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1 year ago

NCSwimFan

Which doesn’t make much sense either, considering how strong the backstrokes in particular have got in recent years at the NCAA level.

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1 year ago

G8tor

Mabel Zavaros swam a 2:09.79 in the 200 LCM Fly at the FINA World Junior Championships while representing Canada.

About Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though.
Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …